Continuation (Orig. posted Blog-City)

Back again. It’s Sunday of course so I shall not be staying up too late writing my diatribes (enjoyable though that was yesterday) So I’m writing now so I can get the bulk of it done during the day then tack on anything I may want to later this evening.

I am currently trying to offload a whole load of stuff through ebay. I am a horder, have been for years, I go through a phase of collecting everything to do with a certain topic then losing interest. Hitting 30 started to make me think that whilst it’s all very well to hang on to key things of one’s past. The vasdt array of shite I had built up was a bit much. Especially Apple computers, time to at least get it down to single figures, there is no need for more! I started using ebay in 1998 it was only a US site then the UK people on it were pretty computer-minded so the stuff was good, 2nd hand on the whole and cheap. Now ebay’s overrun by merchants flogging reams of printer cartridges or links to websites for cheap gear or new stuff that’s barely 5% cheaper than the shops. And yet because people think it’s ebay they pay for it. I’ve seen people pay more for 2nd hand items on ebay than it would cost them to get it new if they looked around a little and I don’t mean scour every site on the net just be a little dilligent. It strikes me that sometimes it is just having the item that is important to people rather than what they may do with it. We’re back to materialism again, what can I say, it’s all screwed up. The thrill is now in telling someone you’ve got something, to brag and laud it over them rather than in using what you’ve got. You have to have a widescreen TV, a nicam video, a DVD player with sound system…of course it has to be a known brand. Ultimately we just make ourselves the corporate slaves a la Metropolis. We trudge to work to do a job we dislike supposedly to ensure we can do the things we want in our spare time and then we actually spend all the money on things that we feel we ought to have at vastly over-inflated prices. So we don’t get to really do what we weant at all. Now I don’t suggest for a moment that we can turn back the clock but we shouldn’t need to, it is all about the weighting we give things. If we buy something because we need an item to perform that function we should be looking at whether it can perform it competently not whether the facia looks cool. I had a pair of Levis 501’s once, they disintegrated about the same speed as some of the £10 jeans I’d bought from Mr. Byrite around the same time. Ok I liked the button fly but there are others that have that. I like Calvin Klein boxer shorts and I do find them comfortable and good quality but they are no more than a pair of pants and there’s no way I’m spending £15 on a pair of chuddies. (Especially not when you can get them for £4-5 online, though even that seems a bit steep!)

Anyway, Sundays at the moment have lost their sting since I handed in my notice, I only have 3 weeks to work in my present job before a new chapter begins. We shall see what that brings, I will no longer be in the private sector so the profit motive will have been removed to a degree. I’m looking forward to it.